Portraits of the Mind

Portraits of the Mind

A selection of images of the long history of the brain's depiction, from the first raw sketches of antiquity, through early electroencephalograph (EEG) recordings, to the abstract art of modern-day scanners

Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century by Carl Schoonover is published by Abrams (£22.50). To order a copy for £18 with free UK p&p, go to guardianbookshop.co.uk

Saturday 27 November 2010 19.04 EST
First published on Saturday 27 November 2010 19.04 EST

A human skull inscribed by a nineteenth-century practitioner of phrenology. According to this now discredited theory, bumps on the skull betray the volume of the brain areas beneath each one, and thus can be employed to divine a subject’s cognitive or moral strengths and weaknesses

Drawing of a dog’s olfactory bulb by Italian physician and scientist Camillo Golgi. The features that appear here were revealed by a revolutionary method for staining nervous tissue that bears his name

Drawing of the neuronal circuit found in the retina by Spanish scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal in 1901. By applying Camillo Golgi’s tissue-staining method with patience and virtuosity, he laid the foundations for the modern field of neuroscience

Image taken from a transgenic “Brainbow” mouse that enables neuroscientists to distinguish between neighbouring, densely packed neurons by illuminating them in different colours. This photomicrograph reveals the disposition of axons (the long portion of a neuron that generally conducts impulses away from the body of the cell) that regulate the contraction of certain muscles

A subset of neurons found in the mouse’s retina fluorescently labelled using a genetically-encoded protein. These neurons report only the motion of objects travelling in an upward direction, a feature that is predicted by the anatomy of their dendrites

Electroencephalogram of a human patient undergoing a seizure. Each horizontal line represents electrical activity recorded at a different place on the scalp. EEG recordings such as this one enable clinicians to locate the source of seizures, and guide subsequent treatment

Image taken from a transgenic “Brainbow” mouse that enables neuroscientists to distinguish between neighbouring, densely packed neurons by illuminating them in different colours. This photomicrograph shows a few of the many neurons that are found in the neocortex

A summary of the known connections between the amygdala, a structure deep inside the brain that processes emotions, and the different areas of the cerebral cortex—many of which are thought to be involved in what are thought of as ‘rational’ features of the mind. The multitude of connections between these areas argues for a view in which thought and emotion are less dissociable from each other than is commonly believed

Photomicrograph of the microscopic blood vessels that carry nutrients to neurons in the brain, obtained with a scanning electron microscope. This sample, from human cerebral cortex, shows a large blood vessel at the surface of the brain (top), which sends down thin, densely branched capillaries to deliver blood throughout the entire cortex